Presenting is Not Teaching

Presenting is not teaching (AKA defining your goals and purpose).

My goal is to help experts in their field — who are now expected to teach their expertise — be as effective as possible. To not present their material like a preacher, a TED Talk, or a podcaster — but to use simple techniques to help students retain the information being shared.

We must recognize that if you have been hired to teach, that does not mean that you should simply lecture at your students (though a skilled lecturer can be an effective teacher, if certain components are employed). That also doesn’t mean you just assign group work, mistakenly thinking that students will learn from one another (a rare experience, while group work is instead often riddled with boredom, confusion, and misinformation). 

Your assignment is to use best practices to teach your students — so that they, in turn, can use best practices. But… you’re not trained in those educational practices, skills, and techniques learned both in graduate school and from 36 years of hands-on classroom trial-and-error with students at every level and capacity. I can help.

I think of true, effective teaching as taking out a time-worn, appreciated recipe – but then recognizing that some of your consumers are now allergic to nuts and/or gluten, are vegetarian, or even vegan. So, you must produce a cake that everyone can eat. You have not been given extra time and certainly not extra money, but you must bake a cake that adjusts to all known differences and needs. The old recipe is not going to work.